As a commuter, I always marvel at the courtesy of ticket inspectors when they face loutish behaviour. I couldn’t take that kind of thing without responding physically and would have lasted a nanosecond if confronted in such a manner.

Train companies specifically train their employees not to respond. In this case, 19-year-old Sam Main, who admitted he was drunk, didn’t have a valid ticket for his journey between Edinburgh and Polmont.

He argued for ten minutes with the ticket collector while the train was stationary (on a train ten minutes at standstill is a lifetime), saying he had given a ScotRail employee the ‘****ing ticket’ and the like.

Finally, Mr Pollock, a burly chap, got up from his seat and grabbed the oik, pulled him down the carriage and then dumped him out of the door on to the platform to the cheers of other passengers. When I watched the clip on YouTube, I cheered, too.

Problem is that the force used may not have been entirely proportionate. If "big man" is not charged there will be a load of other "wanna be heroes" who will get themselves on YouTube doing "good deeds".

I am not saying I agree but there is a reason that Joe Bloggs cannot take the law into his own hands.

Gualsa wrote:Problem is that the force used may not have been entirely proportionate. If "big man" is not charged there will be a load of other "wanna be heroes" who will get themselves on YouTube doing "good deeds".

I am not saying I agree but there is a reason that Joe Bloggs cannot take the law into his own hands.

Only a court can say if the Force used was proportionate, we will wait and see what happens. I wonder he if is going for dosh

The “Big Man”, 35-year-old Alan Pollock, who threw an apparent fare dodger off the 9.33pm train from Edinburgh to Perth, has been charged with assault by the British Transport Police, after the incident was filmed and posted on YouTube, where over 2 million people saw it. The teenager hurled off the train by Pollock has also come forward since the video went viral: Sam Main, 19, a student surveyor at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, says that he wasn’t a fare dodger at all, but had been sold the wrong tickets.

The video shows Main being asked, repeatedly, to leave the train; then Pollock stands up, asks if there’s a problem, and ejects Main. Another passenger then throws Main’s bag off, and Pollock prevents the teenager from getting on again. Main now claims to have suffered cuts and bruises; also that he was diabetic, and was afraid that his bag, with his medicine, had been left on the train. Both Pollock and Main must now report to the local procurator fiscal.

Commentators have largely portrayed Pollock as an old-fashioned hero winning the fight over an unruly yob. Pollock, who works for an investment management company in Edinburgh, is remaining silent about the incident. At least ticket collectors are happy – they claim that since the video, passengers have been behaving impeccably.

“I brought my children up to know right from wrong and that’s all my son was doing,” said Alan Pollock’s father, quoted on Deadline News.

Bad news for the public-spirited. I knew it, sighed Tom Utley in The Daily Mail: “The wrong man would end up in trouble with the law.” Pollock, a “public-spirited banker”, now faces Christmas “under the shadow of prosecution,” leaving public-minded people “groaning in despair.” The very fact that the video was seen by so many says “something profound about the psychology of modern civilised man.” Surely, we all “seethe” at the fare dodger’s anti-social behaviour. And we know, too, that most of us wouldn’t have the guts to do what the “big man” did. Utley himself would have abided by the “watchword of the modern urban commuter: ‘Don’t get involved.’” In charging Pollock, the police have given “cowards like me yet another excuse for refusing to get involved: don’t stand up for the silent majority, don’t do what you know to be right – or the law will throw the book at you.”

“I don’t condone the way I spoke to the conductor. But still there’s no way that anybody possibly who has seen the video can condone the way the passenger chose to handle the situation,” said Sam Main, quoted on The Daily Mail.

But things need to be taken in context. Perhaps we should stand back a little, said Vicky Allan in The Herald Scotland. We shouldn’t be too quick in making Main a “symbol or scapegoat”; perhaps, too, we should be wary of deciding that Big Man represents “the revenge our society needs on the young.” The problem with these YouTube videos is that we only see tiny fragments – and then fill them out with our own, “sometimes unfounded” fears. But there are “real people” in these dramas. If you actually look at the video, the response of passengers is “fairly mixed.” And the same can be said about the “virtual trial” that this YouTube video has triggered.